The Value of Thinking Long and Slow
TL;DR Embrace the snail’s pace that is thinking for yourself in service of strengthening that ability; when it comes to Ai, be mindful of what you are trading in the name of speed.
1.
The book I’m working on now is evolving into something neither the author or I thought it would be at the outset. We had some goals and created a framework/container to work within, and then we began to explore ideas within that framework.
I always say, “The book will tell you what it wants to be. Our job is to listen.” What I am realizing is that while it may have a sense of what it wants to be at first, it’s the job of the author (and co-writer if there is one) to give the book time to become, so it can manifest the highest expression of that desire.
In other words, instead of making the book commit to a direction when none of us really know what it wants to be just yet, we are giving it the time and space it needs to find itself.
2.
I am an early adopter of technology and have invested many hours learning about the nuts and bolts of Ai. I also read constantly. Partly to keep up but mostly because technology genuinely interests me.
Here’s where my thinking is at the moment. The potential for Ai to be truly helpful to me as a book strategist and editor is there but to exploit it properly—meaning without fighting with it or completely abdicating the project to its vagaries—I will need to upskill. Like, a lot. (And you probably do too, but that’s another post.)
So much of writing is saying a lot of different stuff to yourself to get to what you really think. And that takes time. Time to wrestle with ambiguity and try ideas on, and see what connections—related and not—are triggered. A struggle, that left to its most basic mode, an Ai will assume you want removed.
3.
It takes time to unearth all the wisdom a client has accumulated over a long career. That is why I’m so loath to cap the number of interviews on book projects. You have to get through the hyper-sanitized version of the story (problem-approach-result) to get to the reality of what went wrong, the best bad choice that had to be made in response, and how it all turned out in the end. Because, as story master Robert McKee says, “That’s how life is.” If you can do that, you’ve got them (the reader) because they recognize what you’re saying as the truth.
4.
Someone who has spent a lot of time thinking about thinking and Ai, and is way more qualified than I am to opine about it, is Shae O. Omonijo. She has a brilliant Substack, Ai, Humanities, and the Future of Work. I believe, as she does, that now more than ever we need to “strengthen judgement, creativity, and curiosity in a world increasingly mediated by algorithms,” so we can “learn how to live meaningfully in the digital age.”
FWIW: It has taken me six hours over a number of weeks to write this post and it could take even more thought but it’s right to ship it now, especially given the topic! Even so, I’m better for having spent time on it. And hopefully you are, too.
